Category: W.

There's only one time W. has seen any love on my face, he says. It's in a photo Sal took on the Greyhound bus from Nashville to Memphis, W. looking forward into the camera, full of amiability, and I, head turned, looking at him, looking at his ear, in perfect love. Was it love, though?, W. wonders. Was it just an accident of photography, capturing in a split section a facial expression on the way to its usual apish sullenness?

Ah, but we really did learn about love on that Greyhound. I'd forced us onto the back seats, W. remembers. We'll get less travel sick there, right at the back, I'd said. And where did we end up? Next to the toilet! Next to the bus toilet! You'd have thought with my belly, I would've known to avoid the toilet, but no, there we were, next to the toilet, which reeked.

We had to press orange skins to our noses, didn't we? We had to eat up our oranges – part of the packed lunch Sal'd made for us – and cover our faces with their skins. The stench!

Then a passenger came to try the toilet door. – 'Don't do it!', we told her. But she opened it a crack, and the smell worsened. – 'My God', she said. She went back to her seat and returned with a portable air freshener which she sprayed in the sign of the cross as she went in the door.

We looked at each other. She went in! Is she mad? Minutes passed. We heard humming inside. And then she emerged, smiling. No sound of a flush. She cleaned the loo, W. says. She cleaned it for us, for all of us. For everyone! We looked at one another in awe. That's love, W. said.

There are said to be strange superstitions among those former Essex postgraduates who found academic employment, a conventional career. There are odd practices that would themselves be worthy of scholarly analysis. Is it really true that you have to leave your back door open in case a former associate raps at your window? Is it true that a place must always be left at your table in case a former Essex postgraduate arrives unbidden for a meal?

Some say that there is a secret fund into which the more solvent former Essex postgraduates pay upon which their poorer fellows might draw; that there is a shadowy Institute of Study, a secret society with secret rituals, akin to the Freemasons, to which all the former Essex postgraduates belong. That there are secret handshakes and secret winks; that certain signs allow one former Essex postgraduate to recognise another, even though they belonged to different academic years and might never have met at their alma mater.

How can he explain it to me?, W. wonders. He recalls the legend of Chouchani, the Talmudic master who taught both Levinas and Weisel.

No one knows anything about Chouchani, W. says, where he was born or grew up; where he acquired his immense learning which was not just about Judaism and Jewish matters, but mathematics, too – philosophy – the arts. How many languages did he speak? All the living languages of Europe, and a few dead ones besides. He spoke fluent Hungarian; fluent Basque. He lived like a tramp, unkempt, wandering, staying for a while with those he took as his pupils.

You had no choice if Chouchani took you as his student, W. says. He selected you, not you him. He'd bang on your window; he'd demand to be admitted to your home. And there he would stay, night after night. There, demanding nothing but attention to the intellectual matters at hand. Nothing but study, and seriousness in study. And then, just like that – did he think you'd learnt enough? – he disappeared. Just like that, he was gone, his room cleared – disappeared.

But we know now where he went, this Mary Poppins of Jewish studies. We can trace his path: one year he was in New York, the next, Strasbourg, the year after, Jerusalem. And didn't he die in Montevideo? Wasn't it in Uruguay that his tombstone can be found, and on it, the lines, 'His birth and his life are bound up in a secret'.

And it's still secret, despire the internet, despite Facebook. Still secret, despite all kinds of philosophical detective work. Whole books have been written about him, he who did not write a line. Whole websites have been set up about him, he who never allowed himself to be photographed. 

His mastery of the Bible, the two Talmuds, the Midrash, the Zohar and the work of Maimonides. His mastery of the latest theories in mathematics, in physics. His total knowledge of literature, ancient and contemporary. His philosophical learning …

Can I imagine it?, W. says. Well, now I am to imagine an entire generation of thinkers who rose to the same heights. I am to imagine an entire generation of Essex postgraduates in whom thought was burning.

How harsh he was, Chouchani! How harsh they were with one another, the Essex postgraduates. How merciless in debate he was, Chouchani! But they, too, were merciless, W. says; they, too, would let nothing pass. How serious he was! But they too were serious, the Essex postgraduates. Thought, to them, was always a matter of life and death.

Had Chouchani really held a knife to the throat of one of his pupils, who was slow to understand the repercussions of Tossafot's commentary? Well, a knife had been held to his throat, W. says, in Essex University Student Union because of some misunderstanding or another, some slowness about Heidegger's commentary on Kant, and rightly so! He needed to be taught a lesson, W. says. He needed to learn!

And hadn't he, in turn, held knives to the throat of younger Essex postgraduates! That's another superstition: that the former Essex postgraduate keep a knife in the house at all times, blade sharpened. A knife that might be used against him if he becomes a betrayer of thought, or that he might use on one of thought's betrayers. So I'd better watch it when I visit him, W. says.

My dreams of publication. My dreams of redeeming all the rubbish I've published by writing another book, a better book …

Do you think a former Essex postgraduate would publish a line?, W. says. Do I think the former Essex postgraduates sought philosophical immortality? Do I think they cared about what posterity would make of them?

Do I think they thought of themselves as thought-archers, firing the arrows of their thought ahead for others to find and shoot on? They shot their arrows upward into the sky, upwards to the stars. They shot them into impassable thickets, into the surging ocean, the most barren desert. Or they shot them into their own breasts, laughing all the while. They shot the arrows of their thought into their own eyes and were drunk with laughter …  

Ah, the former Essex postgraduates wanted no legacy. They'd seen too much to want a legacy. They knew the end was coming. The knew the end was nigh. They knew that there was little time left, that the disaster to come laughed in the face of any thought endeavour.

The former Essex postgraduates took the long view, W. says. The very long view. The view from eternity, from the other end of eternity, when everything was dead and the stars burnt out. They've seen it, W. says, the former Essex postgraduates: the end of all things, the drifting apart of everything, the great cool down. It was going to end, and endlessly to end, that's what they knew.

Still, there were some signs left for the vigilant: a few lines, a diagram, traced on the condensated wall of a sauna, photographed by a curious passerby; a philosophical glyph sketched with a toe in the Painted Desert, preserved on Flickr; a Blanchot-like fragment carved in the bark of a petrified tree nearly at the arctic circle;

a few words written in code in a tourist's guide to Shanghai; an except from an abandoned treatise posted on the comments box of an anonymous blog deep in the internet; notes towards an original idea written as marginalia in an abandoned blockbuster on a Tenerife beach;

a sketch of a philosophical system on the back of a bar receipt blowing about in the backdraft of lorries passing through the Karamwanken mountain tunnel; notes on what one former postgraduate would write, if he had written, if he could be bothered to write, scrawled slantwise across a guest book in a B&B on Krk island;

some scattered remarks towards a decisive rebuttal to the philosophy of immanence, taken down verbatim in the diary of a drunk and non-comprehending companion; a snatch of Hoelderlin style poetic philosophy translated into Inuit as part of a translation exercise in an Arctic TEFL class;

snatches of an interview detectable in the squalling ambience of a Jamaican dub plate, blasted from a sound system; a Sappho-like fragment scratched into the run-off groove of a forgotten flexi-disc; the initials of a three word title for a philosophical masterpiece scraped out on the hull of a captured trawler in a Somalian drydock;

a few lines buried in a time-capsule buried by schoolchildren and due to be opened in the year 3012; the chapter titles of a treatise left as crossword answers in an abandoned Metro on the London Underground; the names of great concepts to come written into a Twombly-like canvas hung in a Manaus art gallery;

a draft chapter of an unfinished book burnt for warmth in the St Petersburg winter; a paragraph from an unfinished paper broadcast as part of a sound collage on a Jeff Magnum internet radio show; Heraclitus-like sayings recieved – who knows how – in a broadcast thought to be from an alien civilisation from the direction of Andromeda;

The letters of a few stray words uttered on a deathbed in the Peruvian jungle translated into European notation and used to score a chamber quartet; recorded table talk slowed down and distorted until they were indistinguishable from noise, on the 501st disc of a Merzbow boxset; Bataille-like poems that might be heard when you play a Motley Crue album backwards;

notes on faith and thinking bound by string and forgotten in a garage until they formed the basis of a new religion among the surviving people of a planet-wide apocalypse in 4012; the crucial missing pages of a fragmentary journal with the title 'On Nature' reconstructed by alien scholars who will visit the earth long after our extinction …

Signs, signs: how will I ever understand the abandonment of the former Essex postgraduate? How their neglect for themselves, let alone the neglect of their thought and for the legacy of their thought?

'Think of what others might have achieved in your place', W. says. 'Think of what other might have achieved if that had been given what you were given'. A desk. A computer. A set of bookshelves. And time, above all, that: time. – 'You're a usurper, aren't you?' I've occupied the place someone else should have had: someone cleverer than me, more hard-working. Someone kinder than me.

God knows, I've stolen his place, too, W. says. I've stolen his time. I've stolen everyone's time, everyone's who's had to listen to me, and God knows, to read me.

'Why do you write such bad books?', W. wonders. Of course, it's a sign that something has collapsed that I can publish anything at all. Do I think I could have published something in the old days, the good days? Do I think I could have brought out a first book and then a second book when there were proper publishers, proper editors?

Ah, how did I slip past the gatekeepers? How did I slip a first book and then a second book past them? I thought I'd been cunning – I thought I'd been clever, W. knows that. Here's a chance, here's a niche, I thought. No one's looking, I thought. A doorway has opened, and if I just sneak through …

I thought I'd seized an opportunity. Thought I'd seen something no one else had seen: a chance, an opportunity. Thought I'd got one over on the world, which in fact I hadn't. Thought I'd stolen a march on the real thinkers, the real writers, who were too busy procrastinating to seize the moment.

I thought: they might be able to think, they might be able to write, but only I'm hungry enough, avid enough to see the situation for what it is, and take advantage of it. Only I'm desperate enough: that's what I thought, pitying myself, thinking that I had no other choice. I've been out in the cold so long, I whimpered to myself. I've suffered enough, I wept to myself, and the tears glistened on my cheek.

Ah, how cunning I thought I'd been. How shameless – and I was proud of my shamelessness. Whilst the others dozed, what had I done? Whilst the real thinkers, the real philosophers, pondered the great questions, I'd written, I'd finished writing once and then twice, for a first time and then over again. How cunning!, I thought, and smiled to myself.

I was a member of the real world, not like the other procrastinators, I thought. I was in the business of marketing, of self-marketing, as you have to be in the real world, I thought. And whilst there was an opportunity – whilst there was a chance to publish, who was I to hold back?

I knew I was writing rubbish, this is what gets to him, W. says. I was gleefully writing rubbish, gleefully publishing rubbish … They'll publish any old thing!, I cried to myself. They'll accept any old rubbish!

Shamelessness: that was it, W. says. I am a shameless man. Let the others procrastinate, I have a book to publish, I thought. Let the thinkers think, the writers write, but there's an opportunity here … I'm going to slip by unnoticed. I'm going to pass through the gates of publication like a thief in the night …

But in truth, I'd slipped by no one. No sentries were posted at the gate, were they? No search lights were seeking to pick me up. No klaxons went off, no SWAT teams appeared at my door, no snipers to pick me off from rooftops. There was nothing – only eerie silence, as after heavy snow. Nothing – snowbanks, white and silent; the sky, white and silent. My first book was published – and nothing happened. My second book – and still nothing happened.

'Even you, even you thought you weren't getting away with it', W. says. Maybe I wanted to stopped, wanted to be punished. Maybe I wanted my gleeful smile to wiped from my face. – 'Something in you knows you've done wrong'. A bad review: isn't that I craved? Indignant emails from experts in my field. Letters of abuse from real scholars … And instead: nothing. Nothing. My book – and the million other books, there being more books published now than ever before – met with perfect silence, perfect indifference.

In truth, there's no one to offend, not any more, W. says. No one cares. It's collapsed – hadn't I taught him that? The academic system's collapsed. Academic publishing's collapsed. The university's finished, and we're in limbo, in some strange new space.

He sees it even in me, W. says, the desire to be judged, the desire to be told off, as by a stern by kindly headmaster. To be told off, punished, and then readmitted to class. I want standards. I want punishment … I want what's right to be right. I want not to be able to get away with it. I do not want to be cunning. I don't want to remain what I have become.

In truth, I only want to be shot, W. says. I want to feel a hot bullet in my temple. I want to feel it shattering my skull. I want the searchlight to find me, want to cut down by machine gun fire. I want to be bayonetted and collapse in the snow, W. says. He sees it in his mind's eye: a smile on my dying face, without glee. A smile which says, justice has been done.

Spurious (the novel) now has its own page at the Melville House website. Note the blurb by the great Stephen Mitchelmore. Details on pre-ordering here.

What became of them, the Essex Postgraduates?, W. and I wonder. What, of the would-be thinkers touched by the heavenly fire? Oh, not the ones who found jobs – not the state philosophers and state political theorists, but the other, the wild philosophers and wild political theorists – the thinkers driven out, and who drove themselves out.

What happened to them, those known thereafter only by the stray signals they sent back? What, as they loosened themselves from old bonds, old friendships, and contact with them became intermittent?

Some disappeared completely. Where did they go?, we wonder. Did they change their names? Did they go underground? Did they travel to the four corners of the earth in search of obscurity? Is that what they've found, in the mountains of Yaktusk: obscurity? Did they manage to disappear in the ice deserts of Antarctica? Did they lose themselves in the rebuilt Shanghai or in the Favelas of Rio de Janerio? Did they hole up in the Aleutian islands to write a magnum opus?

Did they wander like Japanese poets through the stone forests of Yunnan, leaving traces of their passage with fragments of as yet unwritten philosophical masterpieces? Did they take to the steppes to think and write in secret, getting ready for their magnificent return? Did their heads seem to explode as they lay beneath shooting stars on Goa beaches bombed out on ketamine? Did the pain seem to radiate out of them like light as they volunteered to be crucified in Pampanga?

Some devoted themselves to politics, we're sure of that, to militancy, joining the Zapististas, signing up with the Naxalites. Some joined the last of Maoists in Nepal, others to fight alongside Hamas in Palestine. Still others became partisans, became insurgents, became warriors of the scrubland, sleepers on the plains, ever on the move, ever watchful. Some deserted to head further into the wilderness, further into obscurity. Some were known only as missing persons, their relatives searching for them in third world jungles, their friends leaving tributes on Facebook pages.

Some became ill, mentally ill, we're sure of that. They wanted derangement, to derange themselves. They wanted insanity, seeking it by every means: by drugs, to be sure, but also by almost ascetic rigour. We must become what we are, they said to themselves. Each one of us is his own illness, they said to themselves. And so they sought to intensify their illness, to drive it deeper, and then to enter wholly into it as into a secret fissure.

Some sought solitude, silence, wanting not to express themselves, but to have nothing to say. Some gave up thought for art, for anti-art, making sculptures in the wild, sculptures out of the wilderness, for no one to see. Some wrote great poems, then burned them, watching the pages crispen and catch fire. Some wrote great philosophical treatises and threw the pages into the wind.

Some sought to lay waste their lives, to throw them away. Some sought to sacrifice themselves to nothing in particular, wanting only to squander what had been given to them. Some drank themselves into oblivion. Some smoked themselves into vacancy. Some bombed out of their brains on hallucigens.

Some wanted to become just like anyone else; no: more like anyone else than anyone, as anonymous as possible, as buried in ordinary life as possible, taking the most mundane of jobs, leading the most mundane of lives.

Some, in our minds, sought to think without thinking, to write without writing. What matters is to live this 'without', they said, very mysteriously. What matters is to live outside thought, outside writing, they said, and we had no idea what they meant.

Some gave in to bouts of despair, throwing themselves into rivers and oceans. Some gassed themselves in bedsits, some launched themselves through open sixth floor windows. Some reddened the snow with chunks of bloody brain and skull. Some broke their kunckles punching walls. Some pissed themselves in gutters, and shat themselves in holding cells. Some cut open their bellies and let their guts spill out.

Some took upon themselves all the miseries of the world; some believed themselves responsible for them all, the miseries of the world. Some cut their throats because of that responsibility for those miseries. Some drove sword blades into their chest because of what they hadn't done to prevent those miseries.

Some sought to side with the proletariat, earning no more than the proletariat, gleaning fruit and vegetables from market stalls, clothes discarded in warehouse bins. Some sought to live alongside the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat, the thieves and vagabonds. Some lived among the subproletariat, the homeless, refugees who had escaped deportation.

Some half-drank themselves to death to live with the alcoholics. Some destroyed the bridge of their nose sniffing solvents, sniffing turps, to live among the solvent-sniffers and the turps-sniffers.

Some became recluses, shutting themselves up inside; some took hikkikomori, living with their parents but not seeing them, living on food left outside their door. Some took holy vows and disappeared into monasteries. Some became self-flagellants and self-scourgers. Some joined cults; some started them. Some preached on the street about the end of the world. Some tried to bring about the end of the world, to bring the end closer.

Some sold themselves as mercenaries, some as prostitutes. Some joined the FBI, others the Israeli army. Some sided with the rats and the cockroaches, and dreamt of being eaten alive by rats and cockroaches. Some wanted to be devoured from the inside out, and longed for biting termites to crawl into their nostrils, to crawl into their ears. Some came to side with viral life, with bacteria and protozoa and dreamt of a world without humans, without vertebrates, without any kind of higher life.

Some, tormented by thought, and the demands of thought, sought to destroy their very capacity to think. Some sought to slice off their own thinking heads, some placed a bit to their skull and began to drill. Some drove pencils through their nostrils into their brain. Some shot themselves through one eye, and then another. Some asked – begged – for lobotomy. Some for their brains to be scooped out of their skull. Some to be left perpetually asleep, aging quietly. Some to be forced into an induced coma; some to be battered into a state of imbecility.

And did some of them know joys, too? Did some discover what it meant to live?

'Are you in your office?', W. emails me. Hineni, I write back. – 'So you speak Hebrew now?' Hineni, here I am: that's what Abraham said in response to God's call of course.  Here I am, ready for my task. Here I am, and this is all I am, waiting in response. And it is what Adam refused to say, when he hid from God, and Jonah, who caught a ship to the far ends of the earth to escape the call.

What does it mean to be called?, we've mused a thousand times. What, as Israel responded to God's call in Exodus? To do before you understand. To respond before thinking. It's the opposite of philosophy, of course, W. says. The opposite of the Greeks, for whom it is more important to know oneself than to walk in God's way, to keep the commandments.

'Know yourself', Kierkegaard wrote, 'and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly'. The mirror of the Word. It is only when we stand before the God who, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, came into the world, suffered, and died for the sake of the sinner, that our despair might become hope. Only then that I might will be to be myself, which means assenting to one's existence as the gift of God, and to the task God sets us. To know one's creaturehood and sinfulness, but to know, too, God as our creator, our judge and redeemer.

Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Messiah … W. has never understood what it means to call yourself the Messiah and the son of God, as Jesus does in the gospels. Jesus becomes real to him at other moments – when he doubts his mission, for example. When, as Matthew recounts it, Jesus's soul becomes 'very sorrowful and very heavy' in the garden of Gethsemane, or when, on the cross, he cries 'My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?'

And Jesus becomes real to him in the parables, too – in fact, whenever Jesus speaks in ordinary words to ordinary people; whenever everyday speech is his medium, and he opens himself in dialogue to all comers, to anyone who wants to speak to him at all. Just as he, W., has to speak with great simplicity to me!, he says. Just as W. has to try and explain things so they can be understood by a simple person like me!

Sometimes the melancholic doesn't know what he's lost, Freud says. He has only a vague sense of deprivation, a general sense that something has gone missing. An indeterminate loss, as immense as a storm cloud; a sense of loss without contour: isn't it from this that W. suffers?

He needs to localise his loss, W. says. To find its source! And he needn't look further than the idiot beside him in his cagoule. It must be his fault, the idiot!, he thinks to himself as we walk through the heather. He wants to shake me, to grab me by the lapels and bellow, 'It's all your fault!' Because it is my fault, he's sure of it.

But what if he's wrong? What if I'm only a scapegoat for his problems? The Hebrews sent a goat into the wilderness, which was supposed to carry with it the sins of the people. And wasn't that why W. brought me up to the moor: to send me into the wilderness, carrying all his sins away?

There goes my loss, he'd say, watching me disappear into the distance. There go my sins. And he'd walk more lightly on his way back to the busstop. He'd sing to himself. The clouds would part … 

But what if grief remained with him, and as heavily as before? What if melancholy never lifted itself from his shoulders? Horror: now he'd be alone with the storm cloud of his grief. Now he wouldn't have an idiot in a cagoule to blame for his melancholy.

Melancholy, melancholy: W. feels half-drowned by its waves. And don't I feel it, too, wandering through the heather?

The mourner, Freud says, learns to detach himself from what he has lost. He leaves grief behind; he leaves loss. But the melancholic cannot leave it behind, and comes to identify with what has gone missing. I am my loss, he says. I am nothing other than my loss. His life, his very existence, is indistinguishable from a kind of tomb.

I am my loss, and nothing other than my loss: isn't this what W. says to himself? Isn't that why he feels so unworthy, so wrong? I cannot live; I cannot exist: so the melancholic. While I live, there is no hope, so the one who cannot leave behind his grief. And in W.'s case? – 'While you live, there is no hope', he says. No hope for him, for any rate. 'While you live, I can't exist'. I've entombed his hopes within me, buried them there. He's suffocating to death in the airless room of my life.

Essex, in the old days. The University of Essex …

W. remembers the guest speakers of the old department. Envoys from Old Europe, taught by the Gods of Old Europe: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and who told them about the Gods of Europe; thinkers who were friends and contemporaries of Deleuze, of Foucault, and who told them of the world of Deleuze and Foucault; thinker-experts who'd spent their whole lives in the archives, or studying in seclusion with the works of a Master. Thinker-militants who'd hung out with Debord and Vaneigim, and who could pass on stories of Debord and Vaneigim.

Literary scholars who read in 27 languages; philosopher-scientists with advanced degrees in astrophysics and molecular biology; thinker-mathematicians fascinated by dissipative structures and complex systems; thinkers of irreversibility and indeterminism, of strange loops and paralogic …

Neurophenomenological thinkers. Neo-Spinozists thinkers and Neo-Leibnizians. Nominalists and anti-nominalists. Mathematical thinkers and poetical thinkers.

Thinkers who had had distinct phases in their thought. ('In my early writings, I was convinced that …'; 'Later on, I concluded that …'; 'For a long time, I thought …') Thinkers who were the subject of conferences and roundtables.

Thinkers who hated other thinkers ('Don't mention Derrida to him!'), thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, become name-calling, hair-pulling.

Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke in great gusts about the misery of their lives. Thinkers who told them why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come, their end and the end of the world.

Wild thinkers; drunk thinkers; high thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth, with a missing eye. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouth. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks. Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Thinker-declaimers, thinker-prophets who all but set fire to themselves in the seminar room.

Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, leftover from vanished intellectual movements; thinkers in mourning for dead thinker-partners. Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and expulsions.

Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts (Jean-Luc Nancy, after a trip to the USA). Thinkers in plus fours (Marion, trying to impress the dons at Cambridge). Thin thinkers in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp checkbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and thick folds of fat at the back of their necks. Worker-thinkers with thick, flat fingers and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines. Serene thinkers, almost godly, looking into the infinite with widely spaced eyes.

Laughing thinkers, who laughed because they could think, because of they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of unimaginable purity. Nomadic thinkers who, like swifts, never touched down, who moved only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages across ice-sheets and through jungles. Ascetic thinkers who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things we couldn't imagine.

Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, and to be alive.

Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talk, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought. Thinkers who said the only thing that mattered was to think.

Ah, didn't they meet them all, all the thinkers of Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates?, W. says.

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink as a postgraduate student, W. says. It's where he learned to drink, he who had been near-teetotal before – and to smoke, he who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, with his fellow postgraduates.

Do I have any sense of what was like to feel part of a generation?, W. says. Can I understand what it was to have something expected of you, to have faith placed in you? How can I grasp what it meant to have a sense that what was happening could have done so only there and then – that the conditions were right for something to begin, really to begin?

Did they think they could change the world?, I ask him. Not the world, but thought, W. says. They thought they could change thinking. Thought they were the beginning of something, a new movement. Thought they augured what Britain might become: a thinking country, just as France is a thinking-country, just as Germany was a thinking-country.

This is where they spoke, and of great things. This is where they spoke – can I even understand what that means? To speak, to be swept along by great currents. To be borne along, part of something, some ongoing debate. And for that debate to have stakes, to matter. For thought to become personal, a matter of where you stood in the most intimate details of your life. Ah, how can he convey it to me, who has never known intellectual life, intellectual friendship? How to one who barely knows what friendship means, let alone the intellect?

A life of the mind, that's what they'd chosen. A life of the mind for postgraduate students from all over Britain, and therefore a kind of internal exile. Because that's what it means to be a thinker in Britain: a kind of internal exile. They turned their backs on their families, on old friends. On the places of their birth. They'd turned from their old life, their old jobs, old partners. They'd travelled from the four corners of the country to be here, to arrive here, to be reborn here. Essex, Essex: what joy it was in that dawn to be alive …

This is where they spoke, says W. very insistently. Do I know what it means to speak? This is where they argued. Do I know what it means to argue? This is where they fought in thought. This is where they loved, too. The Student Union Bar: this is where thought was alive, thought was life, thought was a matter of life and death …

This is where they spoke. Voices trembled. Voices were raised. They laughed, and the laughter died away. Did they weep? No doubt there was weeping. No doubt some wept. This is where they promised themselves to thought. This is where they signed the covenant …

It was like serving together in a secret army. Even now, when he meets them, the former postgraduates of Essex, he sees the sign. Even now, it's clear; they are marked – they were marked then. Thought was life. Thought was their lives. They were remade in thought's crucible. They flared up from thought's fire. 

They learned to read French thought in French, German thought in German. They studied Latin and ancient Greek. Imagine it: a British person reading ancient Greek! They crossed the channel and studied in Paris. They plunged into Europe and studied in Rome. They visited great archives. They read in great libraries.  

They were becoming European, W. says. Do I have any idea what it meant: to become European. Some of them even learned to speak other languages. Imagine it: a British person speaking French. Imagine it: an Englander in Berlin, conversing in German …

They went en masse to a two-week conference in Italy. Imagine it: en masse, British postgraduates at a two-week conference in Italy. They played chess in the sun, and drank wine until their teeth turned red. Italy! The Mediterranean! Who among them had any idea of Italy, of the Mediterranean? Who who had ever been to Italy, or to the Mediterranean?

The sun burned them brown. Their pallid British bodies: brown. Their teeth red. The sun turned them mad. They thought as Van Gogh painted: without a hat. Hatless, in the full sun, they became madmen and madwomen of thought.

Essex broke them. Essex rebuilt them. Essex broke their Britishness, their provincialness. Essex gave them philosophy. It gave them politics. It gave them friendship, and by way of philosophy, by way of politics. They were close to Europe, terribly close. Like Hoelderlin's Greece, Europe was the fire from heaven. Like Hoelderlin's Germany, Britain was to be set on fire by heaven.

Ah, what happened to them all, the postgraduates of Essex? What, to the last generation – the last generation of Essex postgraduates? Some got jobs. Some found work in obscure corners of Britain (where else could they find work but in obscure corners?). Some went abroad, back to Europe, back to the heavenly fire.

Some fell back into Britishness – fell into the drowning pool of Britishness. Some drowned, gasping for air, finding no air, in Britain. Hadn't they seen too much? Hadn't they learnt what they lacked? Hadn't they a sense now of great thought, of great politics? Hadn't their skies been full of light, of the heavenly fire?

A sense of absolute failure, and that it could not have been otherwise. A sense of total incapacity, of complete inability: it's with that W. has always been left. His incapacity: that's what remains to him after lights out. He lies in the dark with it, it dreams beside him: what is more intimate with his own inability than W.?

No one knows it better. And he will know nothing else; he will be pushed to think of nothing else. The capacity to think only leads him to the thought of his incapacity; he begins only to end straightaway. Why do his powers desert him? Why do they seem always to have left him in advance? 

But he drew a face on his incapacity. He called him Lars and brought him to life. And there he is, his idiot, sitting beside him with a stupid grin on his face. There he is slurping his tea, the living embodiment of W.'s failure.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, W. says. The thought of our own stupidity, for example; the thought of what we might have been if we weren't stupid. The thought of what he might have been, W., if he hadn't been dragged down by the concrete block of my stupidity …

Oh, he has some sense of what we lack, W. says. More than I have, but then he's more intelligent than I am. He has some sense that there's another kind of thinking, another order of idea into which one might break as a flying fish breaks the surface of the water. He knows it's there, the sun-touched surface, far above him. He knows there are thinkers whose wings flash with light in the open air, who leap from wave-crest to wave-crest, and that he will never fly with them.

He's not intelligent enough, that's his tragedy. That there is another dimension of thought, another dimension of life he will never attain; that the murk of his stupidity has a gleaming surface …  He half-understands, half-knows; but he doesn't understand, he doesn't know.

But isn't that his mercy, too; isn't that what saves him? For if he had understood, really understood, how immeasurably he had failed, wouldn't he have had to kill himself in shame? If he knew, really knew, the extent of his shortcomings, wouldn't his blood have had to mingle with the water?

But then if he really understood, then he wouldn't be stupid, W. says. To know, really to know, would mean he had already broken the surface.

Edinburgh. The New Town was going to be built in the form of a Union Jack, W. says, which is ironic. How popular do you think the Act of Union was in Scotland? The Scots wanted nothing to do with it. But the commissioners – aristocrats and rich businessmen, for the most part - wanted access to the markets of the English colonies for trade. 'We were brought and sold for English Gold', Burns wrote. And on the day the treaty was signed, the bells rang out at Giles Cathedral, Why Should I Be So Sad On My Wedding Day …

And it wasn't long before there was money enough in Edinburgh to build the New Town. The richer got richer, and the prestige of the Old Town, where the rich and the poor lived together, higgedly-piggledy, gave way to the prestige of the new town, built in the classical style, with its orderly symmetry, its broad thoroughfares and wide squares.

Whiskey at the Cumberland. The barman makes us recommendations. We'd tell him we're not English, if we could. They hate the English up here, and who blames them? We've got nothing to do with England!, we'd cry. There's not a drop of English blood in our veins! But of course there is: if not real blood, metaphorical blood. We're full of metaphorical English blood …

Of course, we're all too English! We hate our country because we're of our country, made of it. Hating England, we hate ourselves, as we should. And hating ourselves, we hate how England made us. – 'Especially you!', W. says. 'You're the worst!' I'm the worst, and therefore deserves the greatest hatred. It's for my own good! It's for his own good, says W., since he has to hang out with me.

England, our England. England, our misery. We should drown ourselves in whiskey. Yes: that's what we're going to do: drown ourselves. W. wants to see me drown, he says. He wants to see whiskey in my eyes, whiskey pouring from my nose. From my ears! He wants to see whiskey poring out of my ears!

Let's get ourselves beaten up, W. says, as we wander up the hill into town. Let's pick a fight with a tough. The secret is to get in quick, and then get out, I've said to him about fighting. You have to strike before the other fellow has a chance. A jab to the jaw. A punch in the wind. – 'You've never actually been in a fight, have you?', W. says. He'd like to see me fight, W. sees. Actually, he'd just like to see me punched. He'd like to see me coughing up blood on the street. He'd like to see bits of my teeth on the pavement …

The train to Edinburgh, up the east coast. We sit on the right hand side of the carriage for the view and are cheered when we see the expanse of the North Sea. We should toast the ocean!, W. says, but they don't sell Plymouth Gin in the restaurant car. What are we to do?

W. reads to me from his notebook. A rabbi, a real cabbalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything.  Two plastic cups of Plymouth Gin would usher in the reign of peace, he's sure of it, W. says.

He doesn't really know the North Sea, W. says. He doesn't really feel it. What lies across the water, for instance? He doesn't even know that … Denmark, I tell him. Travel east, and we'd reach Jutland, and the port of Esbjerg. Denmark! That's where the Vikings came from, W. says. – 'Your people, pillaging and marauding …'

The Vikings: haven't I always maintained they've been misunderstood by history - that they a melancholy people, restless only because of their life-disgust, because of their overwhelming sense of the futility of life? Haven't I extolled to W. Viking heavy-souledness, which drove them to the New World, of course, settling in Newfoundland, but also southwards down the coast of present-day North America, all the way to what became Mexico?

And didn't they follow the coast of Africa almost all the way down, being defeated only by the terrible seas of the Cape of Good Hope? There were Vikings in Constantinople, of course, when it was the capital of the Orthdox world. A contingent of melancholic Viking longshipmen were part of the imperial guard …

And didn't the Viking carry their flat-bottomed longships overground to reach the Red Sea and then the Indian ocean? Weren't there Viking settlements along the edge of East Africa? And aren't there pockets of India where blue-eyed, heavy-souled natives claim ancestry from lost Danish colonies?

No gin, so we settle for cans of Stella from the trolley. To the sea!, we toast, banging our cans together. To the sea, as the dusk falls, the drafts of our collaborative paper on our laps …

It's the kind of day you might come across a corpse, we agree, as we walk out on Dartmoor. It's the kind of day someone might come across our corpses.  

God's watching us, W. says, can you see? But I can see nothing but the overcast sky.

W. tells me of his long walks on the moors with his walking friend – a proper walker, not like me – and of the great conversations they would have, on every topic. They would speak of the decline of Dartmoor tin-mining and quarrying, and of the abandoned long houses of the high moor. They speculated on the origin of the standing stones left by neolithic moor-dwellers, and of the hut circles they left behind.

They wondered about the patterns of climate change, which once saw the moor covered in forest and then peat bogs. They talked of De Valera imprisoned after the Uprising at Dartmoor Prison, from which no one has ever escaped. They considered the relationship of the Dartmoor Pony to the Exmoor Pony, and of the origins of the wild cat, the Beast of Dartmoor, which attacks the ponies, leaving their remains steaming in the morning sun.

He misses his friend, who's busy with a family now, W. says. – 'He was a man of conversational range, not like you'. Why have I never learned to talk?, W. wonders. Why is it left to him, when in company, to speak for both of us?

There are times, it is true, when inspiration seizes me; when I speak for several minutes, as in a revery. W. treasures these times and likes to remind me of what I said, long after. Did you really say —? What did you mean by —? But for long periods, I'm mute, thinking of who knows what, W. says.

Sometimes he likes that about me, too, he says. Sometimes he imagines my silences to be a kind of integrity, a way of guarding something, some secret. He knows something, W. says to himself, looking across at me. Or, better: something knows itself in him. And what knows itself in me today, in our Dartmoor afternoon? Nothing whatsoever!, W. says.

The rain clears. The open sky. – 'It's come to this', W. says. 'The final reckoning'. And then, 'You can't hide on Dartmoor. You can't keep secrets'. It's just us and our God … 'The God of twats', says W.

They'll find us lying prone, with our eyes pecked out. They'll find our bodies half eaten by the Beast of Dartmoor. Yes, that will be our judgement.

We've gone missing, W. says. Well, he has. They should send out search parties. There should be men with loudhailers calling his name. He's lost on the moor, W. says – my moor. He's lost in the wilderness, W. says – my wilderness. And who will come to rescue him?

Waterloo Bridge. The mighty Thames.

Bridges are always offensive to the gods, we've read. They're the symbol of hubris, of over-striving. Who would think themselves stronger than the currents and tides?

The gods of the river need to be appeased. The Greeks used to cut the throats of animal suspended above the river. They used to throw live horses into the waters, or sacrifice them on the banks. Later, they used to build shrines and chapels on bridges, and priests would spend their whole lives there, accepting offerings from passers-by.

And weren't there more ancient traditions of sacrificing a child to appease the river? W. shudders. The Thames is full of all kinds of offerings: jewellery and figurines, spear-heads and battle axes, mutilated effigies of the saints, crucifixes with the head of Christ removed perfectly preserved in the mud and silt …

Should we throw ourselves in?, we wonder, looking down at the restless, heaving river. But if we threw ourselves in? Ah, but the river wouldn't want us. We would propriate no god, who were neither innocent, like children, or full of life, like horses. Our blood would not mingle the water. And we're worth nothing, or no more than those countless obscure sufferers drawn to the river to throw themselves in. What would it matter if we died, and to who? We'll write nothing worthwhile. We'll think no worthwhile thoughts. Just the reverse! The very opposite!

The river is calling us, W. says, he can hear it. The waters are calling us home, obscurity to obscurity. Will I jump first? Will he? Will we hold hands and jump together?

Ah, where would the river bear us, if we threw ourselves in? To the Dead Man's Stairs at Wapping, where suicides wash up? To Dead Man's Dock near the Isle of Dogs where tide and current wash up the dead? Or perhaps we'd be borne out past Lower Hope Reach, our bodies decomposing in the English channel.

But the river wouldn't want us, W.'s sure of that. We'd be pulled up from the waters, our stomachs pumped of the polluted water. They'd slap us round the face. Wake up! Wake up! And his eyes would open and see me. And he'd retch up the black river water from the bottom of his lungs.

The boulevards at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich are wide and calm, and we wander them like aristocrats. This is where they'll set up base after the revolution, we agree. This is where we'll be tried and executed by the new revolutionary order … 'It was all his fault', W. will cry as they raise the blade of the guillotine above us. And our heads will shoot out thirty feet over the crowds, mine grinning, mine laughing because I'd led W. all the way to death …

The Royal Observatory. This is where the first international terrorist incident took place, we learn. A young French anarchist attempted to blow up the Observatory, to blow up Greenwich Mean Time …

It reminds W. of the passage Benjamin wrote about the July revolution. 'During the evening of the first day of the struggle, simultaneously but as a result of separate initiatives, in several places people fired on the clocks in the towers of Paris'.

And in the coming revolution, where will they aim their rifles?, W. wonders. Where will they aim them, in separate initiatives and from several places? – 'At you', says W. 'They'll fire them at you'.

Ah, what would we see through the Observatory telescope, pointed to the sky? W. remembers Ferdinand's speech in the scene in Pierrot Le Fou. Since the beginning of time, the man on the moon lived alone. When he saw Leonov, the Soviet astronaut, had landed, he was happy. At long last someone to talk to! But Leonov tried as hard as he could to force the entire works of Lenin into the head of the man in the moon. So as soon as White , the American astronaut, landed there, he sought refuge with him. But he hadn't time to say hello, before White stuffed a bottle of Coca-Cola down his throat.

No wonder the man in the moon's fed up! He's leaving the American and Russians to fight their battles down below. He's getting out …! That's what Ferdinand says, W. says. And then Marianne, beautiful Marianne, asks, 'Where he's going?'. And Ferdinand says, 'Here, he's coming here …'

He's coming here. But there's no sign of the man in the moon in our Greenwich afternoon.

London, London. And there was Marx, who came here after the botched revolution of 1848, living penniless in guest houses and rooms. What poverty he knew! What desperation! Cholera took away one of his children; another died of pneumonia. Still, it barely touched him.

'He lives the life of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely …', said a Prussian police spy. This could be a description of me, W. says, were it not for the word 'intellectual'.

'Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do'. A great deal of work – if only we had that, W. says. If only the sense of something urgent to communicate, something on which would steer us through the days and nights!

'He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world' … If only we could sleep after such great labours, W. says. If only knew what it was to sleep, really sleep, after the righteousness of work!

'When you enter the Marx flat your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around a first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything is covered with finger-thick dust; it is dangerous to sit down. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, and everything in the greatest of disorder'. – 'Marx lived in squalor, like you', W. says.

And Marx was writing great articles explaining why the French revolution of 1848 hadn't failed; why Louis Napoleon's victory in the Presidential elections signified to the proletariat, the overthrow of bourgeois republicanism. Marx set up a Political Economic Review in which he embarked on wild jeremiads against would-be allies.

'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against out self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', Marx wrote. 'A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little manikin', that's what the old Marx called Rudolf Schramm. 'Ferret face': that's what he called Arnold Ruge …

Ah, that's what we need, W. and I agree: a Marx to abuse us! But when it came to political work, Marx was an advocate of patience. While the other exiles were busy planning world revolution, he spent his days in the reading room of the British Museum, preparing arms for the fight which would come not today nor tomorrow, but years hence, decades hence …

'England, the country that turns whole nations in proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace … England seems to be the rock against the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb': thus Marx on New Year's Day, 1849 … And he was right, wasn't he?, W. says. It's the rock against which we are breaking ourselves …

The metropolitan proletariat, which Marx thought was England's great strength, met its match in the self-confident bourgeoisie. 'History is the judge – its executioner, the proletarian', Marx wrote. But the English proletariat never landed its blow, and the 'bourgeois cosmos' remained intact. 'Drat the British!', W. wrote on his deathbed. Drat them indeed … Drat London!

Middlesex Hospital, London: And wasn't it here Simone Weil died? Wasn't it here she returned in January 1943, having escaped from occupied France to the USA? It was physical danger she craved – to be parachuted behind enemy lines, or to care for the wounded in the thick of battle. Instead – what disappointment! – she was found clerical work for the Free French.

Still, over the next four months, she found the time to write the work for which she is most famous – reflecting on theology, philosophy and religion, translating sections of the Upanishads and Tibetan Buddhist writings, analysing Marxism: some eight hundred pages sprang forth from her pen. At the same time, she reflected on the nature of force – an abiding concern – reading advanced physics and mathematics.

Eight hundred pages. She wrote day and night, locking herself into her office. She wrote without changes, without erasures, her handwriting very clear, upright and calm.

'I tenderly love this city with its wounds …': she wrote that in a letter to her parents. 'I love this city more and more, this country and the people who inhabit it…' Hyde Park Corner, where she walked on Sundays, was her Athenian agora: she listened to the speakers, marvelling that, during the war, there were still people gathered to listen. She visited working class pubs. She went to noon concerts at the National Gallery and saw King Lear at the theatre. And she went to Mass every Sunday, longing but unwilling to participate in the sacraments, because the Church stood between her and her God …

And all the while she dreamt of serving France. All the while, she dreamt of being entrusted with a mission, of danger, of death. She must not seek out affliction, she knew that. 'I am outside the truth; nothing human can take me there …'

And she ate less and less. She would eat no more than she imagined her starving compatriots. 'My fatigue is increasing' … But tuberculosis was already spreading from an infected lung.  Hospitalised, refusing the treatment that might help her, and still dreaming of using her remaining strength to meet death in action, she died on August 24th 1943 … 

London's too big for us, we decide. It's too big, too sprawling. And there's too much money here, even though there's a great deal of poverty. Too much money! Too much health! Have you noticed how healthy these people are?, W. says of the people sitting around us. They make us feel stunted, we agree. We're shorter than they are – in W.'s case, much shorter, in mine, quite a bit shorter. They have brighter eyes. Their skin shines. They're elegantly dressed. They iron their shirts. And us? They can tell our kind a mile off, we suppose. They know what kind of people we are. We know what kind of people we are, for all that we'd like to live in truth, generosity and grandeur …

We have London sickness, we decide, remembering the title of one of Blanchot's essays. At first, you're impressed at the buildings – here is St Paul's in person, as it were. Here is Trafalgar Square. But these buildings are so sure of themselves, so pleased with their prestige, and so imposing – exposing themselves with such a desire for spectacle that they turn us into spectators who are very impressed at first, then a little uncomfortable, then sick, sick of seeing too much greatness …

We're men of small cities, we decide on the overground link to Greenwich. We love only those cities we can walk across in a day.

Rimbaud lived in London, of course. He was shacked up with Verlaine, the two lovers learning English and taking great walks out through Greenwich (where we're headed) and out in the other direction to Kew. By day, they would spend their days in the British Museum with their 'reader's tickets', reading books by the Communards forbidden in France. Rimbaud wore a top hat like a dandy, and smoked a long clay pipe like a bohemian. In the perpetual fog of the city, he and Verlaine were followed by police, who suspected them as Communard sympathisers …

True life is lacking. We do not belong to the world: did Rimbaud write those lines in London? Was it the 'enormous city' he evoked 'with its skies spotted with fire and mud'. London was the city of rotting rags, bread soaked in rain', of 'drunkenness' … Of Rimbaud's and Verlaine's drunkenness, of their lover's quarrels, where they stabbed at each other with knives wrapped in towels …

Didn't Verlaine shoot Rimbaud in the wrist? Wasn't he sent off to prison? That's what London drives you to, W. says. And that's why Rimbaud fled, first London, and then Europe. And then the world, Rimbaud fled the world. Rimbaud fled all the way to death …

Blanchot and Bataille. Exemplary friends for W. Theirs was a friendship to which every friend should aspire. They met in 1940, after the fall of France. In 1940, in a France occupied by the enemy. The date I start (September 5, 1939), is no coincidence, Bataille writes as the opening line of what became Guilty.

They met in 1940. In a bar, wasn't it?, W. says. W. needs to believe they met in a bar. He needs to believe Blanchot approached Bataille amidst the cigarette smoke, tapped him on the shoulder, and said: 'You are the greatest author in France …' Is that how it happened? Blanchot, who was moving from the extreme right to the left. Blanchot in freefall. Blanchot looking to be saved by Bataille, who, in turn, needed saving (Klossowski: 'Blanchot saved Bataille with so much strength …')

Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure was soon to appear. His How is Literature Possible? And Bataille was soon to write Madame Edwarda, and 'The Torment', the great central section of Inner Experience.

They met nearly every day, these friends. They met in the two discussion groups organised in the flat of Bataille's lover (who was soon to become Blanchot's lover). Denise Rollin, that was her name. 'She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy, if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods, not at all': Bataille's biographer wrote that. Beautiful and silent, beautiful and nearly silent: don't we catch a glimpse of Rollin in the figure of N. in Blanchot's Death Sentence?, I speculate, but W. doesn't want to gossip.

Bataille was said to speak in a manner always absolutely serious: that's always impressed W. Blanchot himself says it, in one of his memorial essays. Absolutely serious, as if the most important issues were at stake. That's how W. dreams of speaking. That's how he does speak, with his more gifted friends.

'Georges Bataille had the power to speak no less than the power to write. I allude not to the gift of eloquence, nor to the notion that he was prepared to play a Socratic role …', so Blanchot. 'When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance', so Bataille's biographer.

The most serious of men. But not grave, not heavy. Light – Bataille was lightness itself, Blanchot remembers. Bataille was life itself … Oh to be capable of such friendship!, W. says. Not to let others down. Not to disappoint them. To look upwards, with one's friend. To look upwards into the sky of thought …

Somerset House, London. They put up an ice rink here at Christmas, W. says. We should come here to skate. It would be like Kafka and Brod on the frozen lakes of Prague. He can see them in his mind's eye, W. says: skating together, two friends, talking literature, talking writing. Skating and with arms linked with Oskar Baum, their blind friend, out with them on the frozen lake to feel the wind on his face …

And now W. imagines Blanchot and Levinas, out skating in some Strasbourg lake, talking philosophy, talking Heidegger, arms linked … And, better still, Blanchot and Bataille, out skating in the winter of 1940, just after they they met. Blanchot and Bataille skating, scarves round their throats, talking politics, talking community in an occupied France … 

But Blanchot would never skate of course. He was too ill! He'd be out of breath. And Bataille, too, with his tuberculosis: he'd be out of breath, puffing on the ice. How unwell they were, the thinkers we admire!

The Fathers went to the desert in the spirit of repentance and surrender to the Lord. The Kingdom of God was their ultimate aim, purity of heart their proximate one. All the way to heaven is heaven, said Catherine of Siena, much later. All the way – and so they read scripture constantly. They sang the praises of God in liturgy. And they celebrated the new covenant with bread and wine.

And what of W., who was expelled into my desert, the desert of my stupidity? Did he ask to repent? Did he want to surrender? He reads – if not scripture, then books nearly as worthy, the great works of theology, of the philosophy of religion. He writes in his own way to celebrate the idea of the Messiah. But all the way to hell is hell, and a desert without a promised land is just that: hell.

Solitude: he knows that. Fasting: in his own way, he has fasted (since I ate all the manna). Self-denial: what has he done except deny himself? The renunciation of  ambition: it was taken from him, his ambition. I killed his ambition … Ah, W. has all the virtues the Fathers admired …

40 years, W. says. It's that how long it'll be? 40 years of my idiocy … 40 years of stupidity … When will he be finally delivered from bondage? 

But he knows Moses died before he reached the promised land. Moses saw it, it is true, from the plateau of Mount Pisgah. The patriarch saw the fertile plains of Canaan, to which he was leading his people.

And W., who's leading no one? He sees only more desert, only the endlessness of my stupidity.

The desert of my stupidity. Will God become a pilgrim with W., just as He became a pilgrim with the children of Israel? Will God walk with W. to comfort him in the dark years of tribulation?

It was in the desert that God spoke to humankind. It was there where the comfort of man is absent, that God addressed the faithful.

But W. hears only the winds of idiocy and the wolf-howls of desolation. 

Where are we? Is this the desert? Is it the great and terrible wilderness that the Bible calls Sinai? Is it the sparkling sand of the Egyptian desert, with no grass for pasture?

This is the place where you come to be nothing but yourself. This is the place to know yourself as a creature solitary and poor, a creature utterly dependent upon God. This is the place of madness, the devil's refuge, where thirst and hunger will drive you mad …

My stupidity: that's our desert, W. says. That's where we're stranded, W. says: in the desert of my stupidity.

The mythical pelican fed its young with its own blood. And with what has W. fed me but his own blood, his hopes and dreams? With what has he sustained me but his sense of what has been thought and what has to be thought?

Now the chick is big and must leave the nest. – 'Fly, fat boy, fly' …

Of the two of them, they decided it was Marx who had the superior analytic mind, W. says. And so Engels worked to support Marx, who laboured in the British Library.

'There's a lesson in that', W. says. When we lose our jobs, I'll go out and dance for a living, and W. will stay at home, writing. There must be some money in my naked Shiva dancing.

I tell W. about my troubles with management. Perhaps I should make a stand. – 'Where did that get you last time?', W. says. 'Squatting in the corner with your trousers round your ankles'.